... but progress

Others may clearly see our strengths and innate qualities; some may accurately discern the direction in which our path should lead, but we are the only ones who can discover where we are to go, and when, and how, and why. It is part of finding out who we really are, and of becoming the persons God has made us to be.
In writing this I am conscious of the numbers of university students who change courses, take years out, or drop out altogether in their struggles to find their direction in life. I urge these, as well as all others who are wavering in some way, changing course, burning bridges, giving up, or picking themselves up to begin again, to dismiss all feelings of failure, particularly where such embers are urged back into life by others. In the only ways that are ultimately of value, you have not failed. You are being prevented from wasting too much time. You are not just wanted but are needed to be on the right path, and your turmoil is the result of your own unsatisfied yearnings. Without yet knowing it, you yourselves need to be on the right path; the path for which you have been made.

Any mention of paths, right and wrong, cannot be separated from the fundamental attractions of right and wrong which constantly play havoc with our lives. The tug-of-war between the forces and satisfactions of good and evil is never-ending, and is made known to us by the voice of God within us: a voice of which John Henry Newman has spoken in his sermon, ‘Dispositions for Faith’: -

'Whether a man has heard the name of the Saviour of the world or not... he has within his breast a certain commanding dictate, not a mere sentiment, nor a mere opinion, or impression, or view of things, but a law, an authoritative voice, bidding him do certain things and avoid others. I do not say that its particular injunctions are always clear, or that they are always consistent with each other; but what I am insisting on here is this, that it commands - that it praises, it blames, it promises, it threatens, it implies a future, and it witnesses of the unseen. It is more than a man's own self. The man himself has not power over it, or only with extreme difficulty; he did not make it, he cannot destroy it... This is Conscience; and from the nature of the case, its very existence carries on our minds to a Being exterior to ourselves; for else whence did it come? and to a Being superior to ourselves; else whence its strange troublesome peremptoriness? I say, without going on to the question what it says, and whether its particular dictates are always as clear and consistent as they might be, its very existence throws us out of ourselves, to go and seek for him in the height and depth, whose Voice it is. .......... .... This word within us not only instructs us up to a certain point, but necessarily raises our minds to the idea of a Teacher, an unseen Teacher: and in proportion as we listen to that word, and use it, not only do we learn more from it, not only do its dictates become clearer, and its lessons broader, and its principles more consistent, but its very tone is louder and more authoritative and constraining. And thus it is, that to those who use what they have, more is given; for, beginning with obedience, they go on to the intimate perception and belief of one God. His voice within them witnesses to him, and they believe his own witness about himself. They believe in his existence, not because others say it, not on the word of man merely, but with a personal apprehension of its truth.'

And so, conscience, having already matured within us, takes its place, as it were, before us; recognised, acknowledged, and, as likely as not, a source of niggles and worries rather than something to be listened to. It is an immense power for good, but if my own experience is anything to go by, it can be a long time before we understand this, preferring to let the years slip by without being unduly troubled by it, or, at least, without allowing ourselves to be confronted by its accusing finger.
Without stopping to face it head on, that is how we experience it: that is how it seems to be. No sooner do we sense it than we turn away from it; the very awareness of its presence rising within us troubles us too much. We already know what it is going to say to us, and have no wish to be made to recognise our own wrongdoing, - especially if it speaks to us before we have actually gone wrong.

And yet, it is all so false. Our holding it at bay in that way tells us from the start that we have recognised it for what it is. It is unavoidable, and it has the power to make our choosing of the right course of action so simple. And yet we repeatedly manage to brush it aside while fully understanding what we are doing, and all the time longing to follow the opposite course, -the one towards which it was directing us.

'I do not understand my own behaviour; I do not act as I mean to, but I do things that I hate.

...though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not:

the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want - that is what I do.'

(Romans 7:15,18-19.)

So says St Paul, and surely, so would say any good and honest man or woman who has ever lived.

In the same way that our conscience will guide us through every right and wrong moment, every action, every thought, if we will but let it, it is constantly trying to steer us in the overall direction best suited to our nature and our particular skills. It is not in preventing, accusing, and reprimanding that it has its reason for being. It strives to match our giftedness with the areas of need which cry out for it; and this striving is not so much in the assessment and recognition of our calling, as in the implementation, which requires our consent and ongoing commitment. It is in trying to awaken us to ourselves and to our calling that our conscience never sleeps.

Our experience and understanding of feelings of contentment, happiness, joy, peace, hope, regret, sorrow, fear, and so on, is dependent upon the degree to which we follow its guidance in our daily lives and its calling in the longer term. Our response to the awakening of our conscience plays an essential part in our perception of all the basic and underlying emotions from which our lives are drawn.

Aristotle has summed it up in these few words: -

'Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.'
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Not failure ...

I have written before about my need to put things in writing as a way of unravelling and making sense of my own thoughts and feelings. I do not know when this started but it is certainly not a lifelong habit; in looking back, I am aware of the complete absence of anything resembling what has now become completely normal for me. I can only recall one occasion (prior to consciously setting out on this Journey in Faith) when I did something similar, and that was while in Spain after leaving school.
It is strange to think that I was eighteen years old at the time, had not started work, had not met the person I would marry, had no children of my own, and had never imagined the home in which I now live. In short, my life as I now know it had yet to begin; and, though completely unaware of it at the time, I had no idea who I really was, and had not even begun to wonder who I was going to be.

The few bits of writing I did during those weeks in Spain were not done for the same reasons at all, though I now recognize in my fragmented memory of them hints of what was to come. The single occasion when writing helped me to see clearly what my thoughts and intentions were, came about as a result of simply feeling rather fed-up and generally down in spirit. I had only two or three days left before I was due to sail from Vigo back to Southampton, and, having that day had a single lift on a lorry all the way from Alicante to Vigo, I was just marking time until the boat took me home. I was annoyed, in a way, at having had such a good lift, but at the same time I was ready to return.
All I could do was hang about. I was hungry, having been living on a shilling a day for the last two weeks, though that did buy me a bread roll, a piece of cheese, half a kilo of grapes, and wine in my wineskin. I looked forward to the boat as the thirty-six hour journey included several meals - all paid for with the return ticket I had bought in England.

I had walked out of the town looking for somewhere to spend the night, and it had begun to rain. Having not found anywhere better, (I found a dry place in a timber yard for the next night) I walked into a wood on a hillside overlooking the road, and sat down on my rucksack against one of the tree trunks with my groundsheet thrown over my head and back. I had no tent.
As it grew darker, and colder, and wetter, I began to think about what I was going to do when I got home; what I was going to do with my life. And then I began to write it down. I knew exactly what I would do, and I resolved to turn my thoughts into reality. I would make my parents proud of me, and I knew how I was going to do it. I would take my place happily in the real world of family, routine and work.
By the time I put the notebook away, I had tearfully promised my parents and God that I would make it all happen, and, with my new-found resolutions helping to make me feel happier with my lot, I huddled down tighter under my groundsheet in the hope of getting some much needed sleep.

Sleep did not come; only more cold (it was October), continual rain, and the early discovery that my groundsheet was no longer waterproof. The longed for dawn found me soaked and shivering, and the discomfort made me every bit as miserable as I had been before thinking the thoughts which had developed into those promises.
I was already losing my belief in what I had resolved to do, but I told myself it did not matter anyway as I was the only one who knew; they were only thoughts, not real promises.
I was slipping before I had even started, and I felt guilty about that. I was failing almost as soon as I had made the decision, and, having promised not only my parents and God but also myself, the whole episode only contributed further to pre-existing feelings of failure which, for the most part, I had managed to keep suppressed.
But those thoughts had been written down, and though nobody else would ever know of them, they would not completely leave me while I still had that notebook; - and that was to be for a very long time.
I finally destroyed it twenty seven years later.

It was my memory of that night that prompted me to write to someone years later when I heard from the parents that they had received a worrying letter. Their son, far from home, had made it clear that he was feeling very low. When those to whom we write are unable to help in any way through lack of contact and not knowing exactly where we are, such information is naturally upsetting and disturbing. My letter contained thoughts based on my own experience of writing while feeling low but without posting anything to anyone, and without speaking about it later. My suggestion then still stands for anyone in a similar position today; that we should write our thoughts down somewhere that will enable us – at any time – to either keep or destroy them, rather than actually writing home with them. Writing home, or making any other form of contact, is of course the right thing to do if we include details of where we are and our plans for the immediate future; even more right if we are asking for someone to come and get us. But without this, all we do is perpetuate the worry in those who most love us and care for us. Recording our negative thoughts and feelings, but keeping them to ourselves, not only protects others from undue worry but also leaves us in a position where we can still, at any moment, take complete control of our own life without any shadows of conscience to confuse the picture; shadows resulting from having shared important thoughts with others and then appearing to fail to see things through.

Feelings of failure are just as likely to cast shadows without others knowing anything of what goes on within us; in all probability we shall think we have failed ourselves. But this should be seen differently; we have not failed, but have simply changed our minds; and changing one's mind is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is probable that, however true we think we are being to ourselves, we are still being influenced in our decisions, ideas and desires, by a constant stream of outside forces, some recognizable and others not. And when we think we have at last come to know what we really want, we enter into that supposed solution for a while, until something wells up within us once more, building in force, until we can no longer continue along the path we have taken.
It is not always that we decide to get off through lack of perseverance, or a realization of having misjudged either the path or it's destination, but rather that we are made to change direction: we are forced off that particular path.
There is a path, a direction, and a whole way of being that is right for each of us: - for which we have been made; and we can experience much of our search for that right course as being pushed aside into what feels like failure. It feels like failure because we have not yet found it; we have taken another wrong turn, and if the direction had been one into which we had been led by others, the unavoidable sense of having let them down can turn our supposed failure into an even deeper distress. But this is where we are called to believe in ourselves, and to believe in the worth of whatever burns deep within us. This is the gift with which we have been blessed, and recognition of it reveals the light that will guide each of us into the fulfilment of our potential.
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Unknown

Solitude should not be equated with loneliness. Loneliness should not be equated with being alone.
The feeling of being lonely may frequently accompany the experience of being alone, but the two should never be regarded as being one and the same thing; they may be closely connected or even inseparably entwined with each other, but this should be recognized as being the particular circumstance of individual persons, not taken as being the norm. However rarely it may occur, and however fleeting it may be, a feeling of loneliness is part of most people’s life experience, but here again we have something that is too easily mistaken for something that it is not. Our occasional feeling of being lonely must never be equated with the chronic loneliness experienced by many others. It can never give us an awareness of the loneliness lived by people we never see – those who hide away from us – or of those we do see but who hide their loneliness from us; it can never give us the ability to open our eyes to see those whose paths we cross every day: the seemingly gregarious person at work, or the lost, depressed, or dispossessed persons we pass in our well frequented streets.
For many of us our short-lived feelings of loneliness are merely a form of boredom: a gap in the constant movement and buzz of our lives for which we are not prepared, primarily due to our failure to create such gaps for ourselves. We are out of practice; we do not do it any more; we do not recognize any reason for doing it; it is no longer part of our lives and it has simply faded away. When we suddenly find ourselves in such a gap, we hurriedly search for something to fill it, and whatever activity or venue may be involved is only the means to the one important end: some form of contact and communication with other people.

Thinking and writing the above has raised a mildly discomforting feeling within me: a feeling which reminds me again that we are truly astonishing creations, with a potential to become sources of comfort, compassion and consolation for others – beacons of light in the dimly lit corners of this world.
I am in no position to disagree with René Voillaume’s assertion (previous post) that human friendship ‘is probably indispensable for human perfection’, but I do not regard it as being essential for happiness. Having good friends undoubtedly contributes greatly to one’s feelings of being appreciated, valued, cared for and needed; it helps to keep us cheerful and stimulated, and engenders a feeling of being happy. But this feeling conjures up one of life’s many illusions. It is so easy to believe that feeling happy equates to real happiness, but happiness is not merely a feeling, it is a state of mind: a way of being.

The aim of our spiritual life is often thought of as being perfection. Perfection is what we strive for, and, though we are well on our way when first becoming aware of the fact, it is what we hope to achieve when we first set out on our journey. But what leads us toward that goal is nestled between the two: between our stepping out in faith and our approaching perfection. The aim of our spiritual life is friendship with God. We move toward perfection through our relationship with Him. We gradually become more perfect through being close to Him. This closeness, through the awakened consciousness of both His love for us and our growing love for Him, is experienced as a meaningful friendship with Jesus leading to an ever-closer imitation of Him, not just in our outward actions but in our thoughts, our predispositions, our whole way of being. It is also experienced as an increased belief in the presence of the Holy Spirit, and an orientation towards that Presence as Teacher, Comforter and Guide in our world, as well as the conveyor of God’s love to us. ‘... the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.’ (Romans 5:5)
It is that love which leads us to unlock doors for others, and to play a part in releasing them from the constraints of whatever form of bondage their lives have led them into: to ‘set captives free’. In so doing, and in imitation of our Lord and friend, we are called to bring His healing touch to those held and bound within their prison cells of unremitting loneliness.

“The spirit of the Lord is on me, for he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free ...” (Luke 4:18)

With Jesus as our model and our companion, we can more accurately judge our relationships with others. We may not find it easier as we find it easy enough already: we are far too quick to judge others. To begin with the opposite may be true; the most noticeable difference may be that we find it more difficult to make our judgments because, perhaps for the first time in our lives, we realize that we do not really know who anybody is. And, in parallel with that realization may come another: - that we are not sure who we ourselves are.
Much of what we show to the rest of the world, even to our friends, bears little resemblance to the person we may have spent years keeping buried within our outer shell. For the most part this will not have been based on conscious decisions but on subtle influences, good and bad, real and imagined, inevitably woven into a lifetime of contact and interaction with other people; and such influence applies regardless of the length of our lifetime. A nine year old boy has experienced nine years of these influences, just as his ninety year old grandmother has experienced ninety. The cumulative weight and effects of the experiences and influences are nowhere near the same; the one, as yet, has found little reason to be anything other than who he seems to be, while the other, having been through all that life shows, offers, gives, takes away, and then hides, has reached a point where she knows there is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, by being anything other than who she is. Outwardly, there appears to be little difference between the two persons in their ways of facing the world and the people they meet, but in this, as in our own knowing of ourselves and others at different stages of our spiritual journey, the actual difference is great.

People struggle to see the truth behind our own revealed image, just as we have difficulty seeing beyond the images revealed by them. In Newman’s words, ‘we make clean the outside of things’, and we maintain our selves’ anonymity as best we can.
We can befriend our anonymity in such a way that it becomes a substitute for friendship: it can even become our friend. An already existing prison of loneliness can shrivel still further into a self-constructed dungeon when someone befriends and defends their anonymity in this way. They are no longer unnoticed only, but through their interior hiding from the world, and through a longing that has been perverted to a desire to remain aloof and unseen, they have, to all intents and purposes, become unseen. They have become entombed in what they think they desire: they are unknown, and unseeable.

Here is where we may experience one of the many calls on our potential as followers and companions of Christ. We are needed to follow not only the actions, but the thinking and the feeling of our Lord. It is this calling that raised the mildly discomforting feeling within me when starting to write: a nervous feeling that, in being called “to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free”, we are also being called by Christ from within those entombed in their own loneliness.
He calls us to raise them from their place of death; to lead them into the freedom of life with Him, where they may hear God’s words spoken directly to them: -

‘Yes, I know what plans I have in mind for you, the Lord declares,
plans for peace, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’
(Jeremiah 29:11)

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Never alone

Allowing thoughts to dwell on our friendships is a natural part of belonging to a particular place at a particular time. It is a normal response to our experience of being part of a community of people whose lives are based within that same time and place. Even people who spend much of their time alone have a need for contact with others, however rarely it is felt as a need, and in many cases their solitude may be bearable only because they have the sustaining knowledge of long-lasting friendships.
René Voillaume, who, in 1933, led of a small group of seminarians from Paris to make their base at the edge of the Sahara, and who called themselves the Little Brothers of Solitude, wrote: 'Friendship is something so great and splendid that it is probably indispensable for human perfection. I find it hard to believe that a man without friends can be perfect; at any rate, I am sure he will be profoundly unhappy. Without a friend a man is imprisoned within himself.' (Brothers of Men.)
Unlike Charles de Foucauld, whose life and death in the Sahara was the inspiration for the group, René was accompanied by friends. His words may well have been born of the sense of loss found in merely imagining their absence in such an inhospitable place, and, beyond that, glimpsing for a moment the utter loneliness of such a life without any friend at all, anywhere.

If a man without a friend is indeed imprisoned within himself, it is because it is only with a true friend that he can share the truth about himself, the reality of his experience of this life, and his hopes and fears about what has yet to come. But however indispensable friends may be to some of us, the belief that we cannot survive without them is at the same time an admission of the weakness of our faith.
Solitude is not a prison, and should not be a source of fear; it is a freedom, and our movement towards perfection is enabled far more in that freedom than by human companionship and encouragement. The value of time spent alone is inseparable from the building of relationships within the community; everything communal is based on what men and women have already received as individuals, and the most valuable knowledge and presence we can bring to the communal table is fruit of our own discovery of who we really are. Our real self is what the community needs, and is what the world is waiting for.
However great the contribution of others may be in our journey toward self discovery, the discovery itself, and the realization of what we find and learn, takes place within the mind and heart of the person who rises into life in our time spent alone. We may mature and blossom within a community, bearing fruit in the presence of others, but the seed will have been germinated in isolation, and nurtured in our times of solitude. And once we have been brought to fruition among people, we may find ourselves longing to leave them behind again, until, refreshed and newly empowered, we are called back to take our place among them once more. Jesus’ own life repeatedly demonstrates this pattern to us.

It is our awareness, not of our long-lasting human friendships, but of the everlasting friendship of God through the companionship of Jesus and the presence of the Holy Spirit that sustains us in our solitude.
Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who found himself increasingly called into time spent alone, instructs us – ‘Do not flee to solitude from community. Find God first in the community, then he will lead you to solitude.’ (Thoughts in Solitude.)
The shape of my journey is not accurately described by those words, but something within me recognizes them as being applicable to my own experience. Much of the first forty years of my life were spent in a form of solitude. I am who I am, and have not only learned a great deal about who I am, but have learned to value the person I have found within. An awareness of the presence of God and of our value in His eyes, cannot help but lead to our valuing ourselves, and in that one altered way of seeing the worth of our lives lies the key to our transformation from loneliness to fruitful solitude.

It is loneliness, not solitude, that is the prison. Many of us have experienced solitude as a form of heaven, and far too many know loneliness as a form of hell, especially when in the midst of crowds who neither see nor hear them. Heavenly solitude is filled with awareness of the presence of God, and needs no other. Hellish loneliness may be filled with the presence of people but is completely devoid of any consciousness of God’s presence: awareness of His and Her love, comfort, forgiveness, strength, friendship, companionship, acceptance, guidance – whatever we most desperately need – eludes us. God is no closer in the one than in the other: the Spirit of God is abroad throughout the world, present to every one of us. It is not the Presence which varies, and nor does it avoid or exclude anyone; the difference – and what a profound difference it is – is between one person’s awareness and another’s lack of it.

Our needs may point us towards a potential reliance on God; that potential may lead us to faith in His existence; and faith will open doors as yet unseen, yielding the awareness that ‘Bidden or not bidden, God is present.’ (Desiderius Erasmus).

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Called to care

We make many assumptions about other people's lives and their living of them, based on our own apparently similar experiences; but our experiences are not the same. Even a shared experience will be lived differently by those who share it, not only as it happens, but also in recollection and in its effects. The individuality of the essential truth within any experience, as well as the equally individual psychological, emotional, and physical experiences deriving from it, places our personal reality – whether accurately perceived or not – even further from the grasp and understanding of others than is the outer reality of the experience itself.

I recently came across a quotation I had written out years ago in one of my books of such things. For some years I have kept a written record of passages that registered with me in some way when reading; the underlying reason being that the experience of reading them touched me in some way that spoke of their potential for further thought. I have no doubt that other readers, if similarly inclined, would produce entirely different collections of quotes from the same books. We would, as it were, each find different fruit in the experience of the same tree. Everything discovered would be part of the tree, and we could each point to the words we had found, though our registering and interpreting of them may not speak to others as it does to ourselves.
If we spent time dwelling on this “food for thought” we would no doubt discard some items, perhaps many, but from others we may manage to tease out the meaningful heart of what had touched us in those words, and then, perhaps, we would be able to convey the fruit of our thinking to others. The fruit we had found would have fed us, and, bit by bit, such feeding, along with all the other small touches we experience, would bring about the beginnings of an overflowing: a gentle and unstoppable pouring, through our own giftedness, of God’s love into the world. This is all part of the individuality of the essential truth within any experience. We must hope to make sense of what seems to speak to us, not only for ourselves but for the potential benefit of those whose paths we cross. In my own way, this is what I attempt to do here: to unravel the threads of my ongoing soliloquy that I may better understand my own inner self, and through that better understanding, find and offer something that may in its turn speak to another.

The author of the recently reread quotation had apparently gathered bits and pieces which touched him in a particular way: in a way very similar to my own recording of whatever words spoke to me. He had eventually used them to form the basis of a book which brought them into a form which could be passed on to others. The gathering and keeping; the sorting and re-writing; the wish to pass on the heart and soul of something felt to be of importance; this all seems so familiar to me.
And the subject matter, drawing me as it does with its echoes of highlands and islands –primarily of Scotland, but by association within my memory and longing, also of Ireland – only serves to strengthen the feeling that the indefinable up-welling of emotion accompanying my thoughts of such places is something very real, very important in my life, and worth passing on to others.
The author’s harvesting of words also says something similar about my faith and my journey, the reassurance coming from a realization that there are others who experience the same feelings that are so important to me. It is simply through awareness of the existence of such persons that I find I am not alone in my solitude, nor lost in the losing of myself to the power of love and life. The author is one of these others, and he has not allowed fear, self-doubt, or timidity, to keep him from achieving his aim.
At the end of his introduction, he writes: -
'What I have done in this book is a very simple thing. I have taken the little ships of tradition and custom and legend and history, and I have towed them into port. For years, forlornly and apart, they have floated among my note-books, or drifted past the treacherous shoals of memory. Now they have come to the anchorage of the printed word.' (Alistair Maclean. Hebridean Altars.)
He also writes, 'Whoever brings a gentle mind to what is written here, may He bless, who loves us all, and, as they read, may each catch a vision of The One Face.'

The considerable and constant pull exerted on my mind and heart by these places is a form of meaningful friendship. Regardless of the length of time between my visits, we are inseparable; and though there is an ongoing relationship, it is of course one-sided, and could never be regarded as anything but an unrequited love. And yet, the land itself continues to call me in its own indefinable way, as though local and individual histories from such times as the Highland Clearances, and the Irish Famines, are still reaching out to those who are able to hear their whispers. It seems that the comparatively small part of my blood belonging to these lands, insists that I acknowledge its capacity for fighting well above its weight. Part of the ‘fight’ to which I am called by these ancestral links is the remembrance of those long gone, whose fearful voices still cry out with a longing not to be forgotten - a longing within themselves that someone, somewhere, should always remember them, and a longing cry that can never be forgotten by the one who experiences it.
In some way I am linked to them; they know me as their friend.

In a sermon on The Incarnation, Ronald Knox said, 'It would be a poor doctor who should never call again when his patient had passed the crisis; it is a poor friend who loses interest before he ceases to be of use.' (The Pastoral Sermons.)
Surely, it is a poor friend who loses interest whether or not he is of use. Friendship is not a using of one person by another; it is an uninhibited two way sharing of strengths and weaknesses, which is not barred from any particular aspect or corner of people's lives. It is complete, and it is ever-present, with or without the physical presence of the friend. It is being companions; spending time together, or surviving long absences through having previously spent time in each other’s company; it is sharing the highs and lows, the wonders and the ordinariness of life. A real friend is felt as a companion even when not present, as the reality of the relationship brings a trust, and a knowledge of the permanence of the other's care.
It is in the knowledge that there is someone who will always care, that strength and peace may be found.
In our human friendships, in our remembering of those who have journeyed before us, and even in a consciousness of past desperations and needs in the landscapes to which we are drawn, we each have the ability to bring a constant caring to those who may have no other friend to bring it to them.
However little we really understand each other’s experiences and the emotions aroused by them, there are common threads that run through them all. Above and beneath all degrees of sickness and health, poverty and wealth, exhaustion and strength, ignominy and honour, is the common theme of our humanity. In so many men and women, recognition of the evils and injustices in our world is buried so deep that they are unable even to know that we are all equal, as members of the human race, and in the eyes of God. And, above and beneath that truth, and even less known, is the Spirit of God constantly breathing into the lives of every one of us.

The strength and peace we bring is not our own; the caring is not entirely our own.
What we bring is the compassion of Jesus, and the wonder that is the Holy Spirit.
In spending time with others, we bring them to a meeting: the meeting of Christ in us with Christ in them; and in all such meetings, let us hope that we ‘may each catch a vision of The One Face.'
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A new day

‘To you I pray, Lord.
At daybreak you hear my voice;
at daybreak I lay my case before you
and fix my eyes on you.’
(Psalm 5:3)
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The new day dawns; misty, with a gradually increasing hint of blue in the draining greyness of the sky. No breath of wind: no wind, no breeze, no breath. Not a single leaf stirs.
The gap between trees, where the slope of North Hill props up the southern end of the sky, is a uniform pale grey; the hills have yet to be born into my day.
A brightening: mist bleaching from grey to white; unfocussed shafts of light as the sun begins taking command of the scene, and draws the autumnal quilt from this corner of the Earth – the green acre in which my family has made a home.
And now, in that wedge of distance, from within the thinning mist, a diagonal line appears; and in the darkening of the space beneath, a reassurance that the world is as it had been the previous day: the rebirth of granite hills into my certainties.

At the centre of my view, amid the first gentle stirrings of leaves on the nearest Ash tree as the Spirit of God moves through the garden, a deeper waving of a high Beech branch seems to beckon me: ‘come, up, out, and into the world’. A Collared Dove has alighted at the branch’s tip, and as its perch settles into stillness once more, the Dove’s swaying body rejoins the unwavering steadiness of its head.
It remains for a while, appearing to return my gaze through the window, until, setting the branch into a repeat of its gentle beckoning, it flies toward me, up and over the house.
God’s touch continues to shimmer among the leaves, and the Spirit stirs once more within me.

Not only the few minutes it has seemed: the clock shows evidence of another time, another place, another life.
Not just a brief appreciation of a beautiful morning: an hour and a half has come, settled, and flown into the awakening day.
The book I had been about to open still lies untouched beside me, and I am returned, awake, from time spent in the peace and the presence of God. – I know what I shall write today.

‘My heart is ready, God,
I will sing and make music;
come, my glory!
Awake, lyre and harp,
I will awake the Dawn!’
(Psalm 108:1-2)
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One to one (5)

'Whoever fears the Lord makes true friends,
for as a person is, so is his friend too.’
(Ecclesiasticus 6:17)

Physical presence is of the utmost importance in a meaningful friendship. In a crisis, a real friend’s presence is the most effective support of all; it outweighs any words that may be said. That presence may include small but significant touches of love such as making a drink, draping a shawl around shoulders, answering the door ...; it may even involve a leaving of one’s needy friend for a period once one’s presence has been felt, perhaps to travel a great distance for them, to meet with someone, or to bring someone back; to deliver or collect something of vital importance to them; a literal going of the extra mile for them. The task may be of such importance for them that, paradoxically, such an absence would be experienced by them as a continuation of one’s presence.
Love may be proved by our actions, by deeds, but there are times when we are called to quell all thoughts of doing things: to prove the depth and dependability of our friendship by simply being there; feeling, loving, watching and waiting. Waiting until the time to listen; listening until the time to speak.

‘They sat there on the ground beside him for seven days and seven nights. To Job they spoke never a word, for they saw how much he was suffering. In the end it was Job who broke the silence...’ (Job 2:13–3:1)

Just as a friend’s physical presence may be experienced as continuing when they have left to undertake some vital deed, so, in a similar way, a much needed friend’s presence may be experienced as having already begun as soon as news is received that they are on their way. In both cases, the presence essential to the creation and deepening of the already mature and meaningful relationship is in the past. The chain holding the friendship together was forged in earlier times spent face to face, and its final links closed by mutual experience and a shared hope.

I have witnessed both types of such meaningful and supportive absences.
The first, a dying lady’s relief and contentment resulting from the arrival of one particular person, who, though out of the house more than in it, and far more than actually at the lady’s bedside, was present to her throughout the night and day, even when absent for several hours. She had known, without any doubt, that once her friend had come to her, any absences were to achieve the essential outcomes required for her own wellbeing and peace of mind. She had complete faith in her friend. And it did not occur to the friend that she could have done things in any other way: at the time, she felt that she existed only to be there and to do the things that had to be done.
The second, involved another dying lady and a member of my own family. As a mother in the middle of Christmas celebrations with her young children and husband, with no wish to be anywhere else and knowing that this was where she was meant to be, she received news that a much loved aunt and friend, Mai, in the west of Ireland was dying and asking for her constantly: -

“Where is she?”... “Is she coming?” ... “Is she here yet?” ... “Is that you ...?” She was becoming increasingly distressed because the one person she needed was not there.
After agonizing over the situation and the seemingly impossible decision she was called upon to make, the young mother travelled from Worcestershire to Ireland to be with Mai. On arrival, she found she was too late – at least, that was how it felt.

As soon as Mai had heard the news that the one person who mattered was on her way, she relaxed, rested, and was content. She died shortly before the longed for arrival. To Mai, hearing what amounted to “I’m coming”, had been an immediate knowledge that she was already there.
Mai’s distress appeared to have been due to her increasing difficulty in maintaining her ability to live: maintaining her refusal to die before the arrival of the one person whose presence would make all things well.

In thinking of these two friendships, and those two deaths, something speaks to me of the continuation of friendship and love, not only during absences through life, but into and beyond the longest absence of all: the one that follows a death and which continues until we are returned to each other’s company through our own passing.
I cannot help but hear again those words from Julian of Norwich’s ‘Revelations of Divine Love’: “… all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
The anticipated arrival, as well as the actual presence of a friend, can speak those words to us. Once we have overcome our grief, the absence of a friend through death can also breathe with an awareness of their continued presence. The above words were spoken to Julian by Jesus, and, through hearing or otherwise experiencing them through a meaningful friendship, we too are being reassured by Him. He is present with us as our Friend, speaking to us through a relationship that is truly meaningful because He is present within it.

The two words, ‘friendship’ and ‘meaningful’, mean different things to different people. For some, almost every person they meet more than once is regarded as a friend, and they may bathe in the knowledge that they have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook or some similar social networking internet site. With the mindset of some others, those same people would regard almost every one of those “friends” merely as acquaintances, and their few friends may not include any they would regard as being particularly close. Whoever we are, and whatever our interpretation of those words, it is only when a friendship includes the integrity of mind, body and spirit, that it becomes both humanly and spiritually meaningful, and develops its own invitations. It places us at the heart of an invitation to unite with and in the presence of Jesus, and it invites the Holy Spirit to come deeper into our friendship and into the rest of our lives.
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One to one (4)

In today’s world it is difficult to believe that worthwhile meetings can only occur when people are physically present to each other. The telephone seems to provide ample evidence to the contrary. It has existed long enough for us to almost forget that there was a time when it was not even dreamed of. It had to be invented before we were able to speak to people as though they were in the same room with us, when they were many miles away, even on the other side of the world. We take it for granted that we can remain “in touch” with others when they are far beyond, not only touching distance, but the natural range of seeing and hearing.
The mobile phone allows us to reach and be reached almost anywhere, and we no longer need the telephone at all when we have access to a computer; and with the lines becoming more blurred all the time, I am no longer sure that a separate computer is needed when we have one of today’s ‘mobiles’. With Skype, for example, we can speak to anyone, anytime, almost anywhere in the world, and for as long as we may wish, without concerns about time and cost restricting the natural flow of words, feeling and emotion. And seeing the person to whom we are speaking removes the most obvious difference between this way of communicating and real physical contact. When cameras allow us to see each other while we converse, we are better able to assess and understand the feelings behind the words we hear, and it is more difficult to hide our own true feelings behind the words we use.
We could say that such live video communication does bring people face to face in all but living physical reality, and it is much easier to regard this as providing a means of meaningful contact, than it is to ask ourselves what more there could be. It is a question of degree. How real does our contact have to be before we regard it as being meaningful?

To meet face to face, to stand facing; to be opposite to. This is one of the meanings of the word ‘confront’, though it generally hints at something less relaxed, with elements of disagreement and friction – to face in defiance or hostility; to present a bold front to, to stand against, to oppose – and it leads into confrontation, with the possibility of third party involvement: the bringing of persons face to face for accusation and defence, for questioning and for discovering the truth.

Our usual thoughts on one-to-one relationships naturally fall into the areas of friendship, of family ties, of pleasure or displeasure in the interactions at work or with our neighbours; affection, concern, jealousy, frustration, annoyance and anger towards parents, children, siblings, or lovers. And, in one form or another, for one reason or another, fear is always in the mix somewhere.
In the context of our spiritual lives, the thoughts tend to focus on our fear of becoming better known; our reluctance to face the embarrassment of admitting that we are less than the person whose image we strive to portray and maintain. Our temptations, our unholy thoughts, our un-diminishing weakness in particular areas of life, and our failures and mistakes, are all carried with some degree of disregard and lightness in our daily lives, but weigh heavily in our conscience when we think to be more honest about ourselves.
A greater degree of closeness in a spiritual friendship moves our focus beyond these troubles to an appreciation of what a true friend can be. It allows us to discover the beginnings of an understanding of what the word ‘meaningful’ can mean in our relationships, and it draws us closer to a way of seeing ourselves and others in a more forgiving, reconciling, and supportive way: a way that more easily attunes us to the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the lives of others, and makes Jesus’ way of seeing us and our world so much easier to understand and to follow.

Our relationships are not meant to provide company and no more; they should not consist of agreement and praise in all things, nor should they be nothing more than mutual confessions of failure and perceived inadequacy; they should not make us life-members of a club for serial-penitents and those who have grown comfortable with their routine of recurring faults. They should bring us into the light, and once we are there they should make that light undeniable for us.
There is good and bad in each of us, and while the bad can so easily go unnoticed in a life without any thought of who we are and why we are here, a spiritual life brings us to a recognition of at least some of our poor qualities. This is necessary, and it is good, but it can so easily become the focus on which we constantly dwell rather than a stepping stone into reality. Jesus calls us to that recognition, but in order that we may change and move beyond it, into a discovery of the gifts with which we have been blessed; a discovery of our potential for good in this world, and a realization of the person into whom we can be transformed.

A truly meaningful friendship needs the complete presence of one person to another. Whatever the apparent relationship – master and servant, companions, lovers – friendship is what makes it work in a positive and meaningful way. It needs not only the honesty, trust, acceptance and support, but the touch, the silences, the creation of space: the intimacy and the safety that come only when people are true friends and in each other’s company. We hear this expressed in many ways: – “I know she’s my mum, but she’s my best friend as well.” - “My very best friend has always been my brother.” - “I don’t see him often, but I feel so safe when I do. I can talk to him about anything and he always says the right thing. If that is friendship, then I only have one real friend.”
It is our presence to one another that leads us beyond our regrets and failings to the quest for fulfilment and the joy that it engenders. We may see clearly the good in our friends that they cannot see for themselves, just as we may be blind to what they see so clearly in us.

‘You have to start seeing yourself as your truthful friends see you. ... You look up to everyone in whom you see goodness, beauty and love because you do not see any of these qualities in yourself. As a result, you begin leaning on others without realizing that you have everything you need to stand on your own feet. You cannot force things, however. You cannot make yourself see what others see. ... You have to trust that God will give you the people to keep showing you the truth of who you are.’
(Henri Nouwen. ‘The Inner Voice of Love’.)

I find that a beautiful definition of a real friend:– Someone who keeps showing you the truth of who you are.
There is no more complete way of showing another the truth about themselves than being with them. For a person who is blind, all I have said about seeing people face to face via video conversations has little meaning; they do not see them when they really are in the same room. But when they are there before them, their heightened awareness via the other senses makes them every bit as present as they would be for me. The same applies to any person who, for whatever reason, is unable to experience the world in the way that we mistakenly regard as the only possible way.
Presence is essential. And who, more than anyone else, can show us the truth about who we are? Who is our closest and most reliable friend? It is Jesus: the person who was present as a friend to the adulteress about to be stoned to death. He led her beyond her regret and the mistakes she had made, and showed her the truth of who she was. He was also present to the men who encircled her, and He showed them also the truth about who they were. That they failed to recognize Him as their friend too was part of the story of the Incarnation: part of why Christ came to them, to us, to all mankind.

He is the one who joins us whenever we meet face to face in His name.
It is His presence that makes our own presence to each other so much more than anything I can suggest among these pages.

‘For where two or three meet in my name, I am there among them.’
(Matthew 18:20)
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One to one (3)

There is one feeling in particular that holds us back; taking many forms and being at the root of other apparently un-associated feelings, attitudes, actions and inactivity. More than anything else, it is fear that makes us withhold the truth and shy away from others who may dare to reveal it for us; it is fear that leads us away to hide from aspects of reality, and once hidden, it is fear that keeps us from altering our way of seeing those things from which we hide.

I am brought back, once again, to the truth expressed in that same passage from John Henry Newman’s sermon, ‘Christian Sympathy’. ‘...we dare not trust each other with the secret of our hearts. We have each the same secret, and we keep it to ourselves, and we fear that, as a cause of estrangement, which really would be a bond of union.’
In the same text, we are reminded that ‘... the one has within him in tendency, what the other has brought out into actual existence ... They understand each other far more than might at first have been supposed. ...They have common ground; ...they have one and the same circle of temptations, and one and the same confession. ... we fear that others should know what we are really ...’

I am unable to read through those words without being taken back to the situation recorded in chapter eight of John’s gospel: the woman about to be stoned for committing adultery. (verses 3-11)
“Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone at her.” says Jesus to the men gathered round her. ‘They went away one by one, beginning with the eldest, until the last one had gone and Jesus was left alone with the woman.’
Here was a time when, in spite of the Old Testament Law which told them to stone a woman in such circumstances, the men present – Sadducees and Pharisees – appeared to act according to the teachings of Jesus. In response to His words, they found themselves unable to avoid weighing their own inclinations and weaknesses, and perhaps their own transgressions, against the discovered act of the woman before them. (But where was the man?). They appeared to acknowledge that ‘the one has within him in tendency, what the other has brought out into actual existence’, and walked away rather than pass final judgement. The eldest leaving first, points to both time’s persistence in its attempts to make us succumb to our weaknesses, and to its granting of wisdom through the experience of constant or repeated temptation, and through the making of our mistakes.

Temptation and transgression both contribute to an awareness that, deep down, each of us differs little from another.

This interpretation may be inaccurate of course. The men may have drifted away due to the failure of their attempt to trap Jesus into saying something usable as evidence against Him; but here was a demonstration of the New Covenant in contrast with the rigid interpretation of comparatively black and white laws of the Old: Jesus telling those present, and us, in a way that clearly brought the message home in the individual consciences of His hearers: -

“You have heard how it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say this to you,
if a man looks at a woman lustfully, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
(Matthew 5:27-28)

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This new way of approaching and understanding mankind – understanding ourselves, and of understanding God’s commandments and His requirement of us, coupled with our Lord’s instruction to forgive and thus to heal, opened up a whole new world: a potential for both unity and ‘sympathy’ within Christ’s Church. It is within this world that our facing each other has the power to heal. It is not possible to face each other for the first time without altering our relationship; without moving the relationship on in some way.
The Law, as laid out in the Old Testament, was not designed to hurt, but the interpretation of it, and the following of it, frequently left little room for understanding, mercy and forgiveness. In contrast with this, the whole ministry of Jesus was a coming face to face with mankind as a healing force. Our following of Him is expressed in our will to meet, to listen, to console, to forgive, to provide and to heal: in short, to love one another.
Those who have heard and understood Christ’s message, and have begun to act upon it, may find this comparatively easy with people from whom they are distant, but remarkably difficult with those they know well: their friends and family members. How is it that we can have a close and long-running friendship with someone and still find it so hard to ‘trust each other with the secret of our hearts’ ?
Everything points to the likelihood that daring to fully open our hearts and our consciences to each other would allow our long-maintained protective layers, and our pretence, to fall away. Beneath, would we not find that we are indispensable companions for each other’s journey, and, one by one, and two by two, that we are all made in such a way that we should all be sharing our journey together?

Could it be that this mutual honesty and openness is an essential without which we are unlikely ever to be empowered?

Are we unable to progress to the next stage with our imagined group of fellow travellers because our fear keeps us out of sight? – Because we do not allow our light to shine?
Love casts out all fear. Let us take the risk.
On the other side of our decision to face someone and to speak our truths to them, is a further awakening, and an enabling that will lead us closer to the certainties for which we long. Acting upon such a decision may be the key to our empowerment: the missing part of our surrender of self to our Lord’s will. I certainly sense this to be at least a part of the key to my own.

Without being empowered by the Spirit of God we shall remain unable to fulfil our potential; we shall remain less than the persons God has made us to be.

Let us crave a new dawn in our lives: an awakening from our sleep; an enabling that will empower us for all that God may ask of us. It begins and ends with us. The whole of creation has to do with us. And ‘us’ begins with you and me, our neighbours and our friends, each of us making that vital decision to meet face to face, heart to heart, and one to one.
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One to one (2)

‘Do not desert an old friend;
the new one will not be his match.’
(Ecclesiasticus 9:10)

Even when well away from the seemingly unstoppable surge of life in the modern world, not just out of the city centre, not just beyond suburbia, not even when we are tucked cosily into the countryside: on holiday, travelling through, on a day trip, or strolling briefly away from the roads, we can be held in the grasp of much that we thought had been left behind. The television, the internet, DVDs, computer games, mobile phones: the many trappings of today’s world that no longer simply follow us wherever we go but are found to have preceded us into almost every corner of the world. If these products of man’s ingenuity were unavailable it would still take us a considerable amount of time to slow down, to shed our supposed reliance on them, and to begin benefiting from the reduced intensity of constant mental activity associated with them, much of which is subliminal. But when they remain as an active and constantly influential presence in our lives, our slowing down takes far longer, and we are unlikely ever to truly switch off from the activity they perpetuate and which drains us of the ability to actually stop, to truly listen and to really see.

It is not only the world around us that we continue to miss: the sights and sounds, the reality, the experience; it is the people in our lives. We may relax more into the presence of family or friends, but the opportunity for finding out more about who we are – who our companions are and who we ourselves are – is missed, because we fail to recognize that such a chance exists. How can we see opportunity where we fail to identify the underlying need? How shall we look each other in the eye and dare to discover who we are if we are afraid to come face to face with each other and with ourselves.
Access to the internet and the habitual presence of mobile phones – even in their simplest forms –allows us and encourages us to believe that we are more in touch with other people, especially friends, than ever before.

Texting took the ‘mobile’ beyond being a telephone, and the same small piece of hardware is now apparently capable of being most things, not only to most modern men and women, but to children down to (and beyond) whatever age their parents now regard as being appropriate for their possession. Involvement in social networks on the internet, especially by the young, has spread so rapidly that it is as though a dam has burst, releasing some previously unimagined need that has ever been locked into the makeup of mankind. To many people, the entire field of instant communication is a wonderful answer to their unspoken, and previously unimagined prayers. It has gone from non-existence to indispensable without any real journey between the two, and the ‘need’, once created and fed, has become an addiction wrapped in an irresistible and illogical desire. The must get, must have, must do, must see, must hear, must show, must tell mentality has been vastly expanded by such groups as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Last.fm which focuses on the perpetual hunger for the mutual enjoyment of music.
That was about the limit of my knowledge of such sites until I looked on Wikipedia! It names more than 150 sites in its list of major active social networking websites (It has another list for defunct sites), and states that ‘the list is not exhaustive, and is limited to some notable, well-known sites.’

With 250 million registered users, one of the ways in which Facebook describes its function is, “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” I have no quarrel with that as an aim, an objective, or as a description of Facebook. If everybody became and remained connected they would become more open with each other, and it works the other way round too; these two aspects of relationship rely equally on each other for their continuation. If living in this world was that simple, and if the power ‘given’ to people by these websites was fully utilized, we could all begin looking for real signs of world peace, of justice, tolerance and understanding, and of a global redistribution of resources and commitment. But as soon as either the connectedness or the openness begins to fade – and it will – the other will start to crumble; a degenerative spiral will be set in motion that will be very difficult to stop.
My seemingly pessimistic outlook on the fruit of so much involvement in these networks is based on the superficial nature of the openness. The connections, however meaningful and however strong they may appear, can only remain if there are other forms of real contact between the parties: some form of human relationship away from the internet with its inherent distancing and distraction. Without it the thin skin drawn over the lives of participants in these networks – the only layer in which they and others may share any level of connectedness – will not take the strain.
The connections have no genuine face-to-face quality; there is no meeting eye to eye; and there is no sharing of what is really going on inside hearts and minds. The busyness of the activity involved in taking part in such networking creates the feeling that we are in touch, informed, being honest, and in relationships. It covers over the simple knowledge that everything shared here is of a superficial nature. And it is our feelings that will always ensure this will be the case; the feeling that we are already truly sharing (and therefore need do nothing more), and an underlying reluctance to listen to any whispers within ourselves that suggest otherwise. We dare not attempt to make it real, as reality demands that we become fully present to others: that we meet them face to face. Technology and modern communications will not do that for us; we must do it for ourselves.

A bringing together of Anglicans and Catholics in the 1920s (the Malines Conversations) was the subject of the Archbishop’s ‘Testament’, from which the following often quoted words are taken; but their truth goes far beyond that particular context. They speak well of the requirements for every form of real togetherness, right down to the central and vital heart-to-heart meeting of two separate, but truly open, individual human beings.

“In order to unite with one another, we must love one another;
in order to love one another, we must know one another;
in order to know one another, we must go and meet one another.”
(Cardinal Mercier)

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One to one (1)

‘Iron is sharpened by iron, one person is sharpened by contact with another.’
(Proverbs 27:17)

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Ronald Knox quoted the above verse in a sermon entitled 'Jesus my Friend', and went on to say, 'your friendship with so-and-so inevitably knocks you into a particular shape, just as one piece of iron knocks another into a particular shape if you hit them against one another. Inevitably, not as the result of any deliberate attempt on the part of either to influence the other, but simply as the result of daily contact. And of course, speaking of human friendships ... either affects the other equally; it's not like sharpening a pencil, which leaves the knife just as it was.’ (The Pastoral Sermons.)
Referring to that same two-sided effect, Carl Jung said: - ‘The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.’ (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)

Such words from people with well known names and acknowledged reputations can so easily be taken as facts applicable to every person and every situation. We make no conscious decision to regard them in this way, but we are easily led by the words of others, and when the words come from a highly thought of name like Carl Jung, who are we to doubt? If something is well put, and sounds reasonable, we skip beyond the careful consideration that it may deserve to an unconscious acceptance of what we have heard or read as fact. We absorb the ideas of others without any real analysis of what we are accepting and believing. Nothing we hear or read should be thought of as being beyond dispute, and this is no less applicable when what we absorb is apparently supported by words from scripture. The above quotes from Ronald Knox and Carl Jung are examples of this, being supported, as it seems, by the verse taken from the Bible. We take such things ‘as gospel’: we regard them as ‘the gospel truth’; and we allow the scriptural connection to blur our understanding of what scripture is, what the Bible is, and what the gospel is. We may still understand what truth is, but we relinquish our ability to comprehend what is, and what is not, the truth.

Many of us are susceptible to this weakness; I always have been, and often wondered whether I really did have any firm views of my own – on anything. In recent years (thank God) I have found that I do, and my slow realization of the fact has brought a welcome belief that these are well considered views based on my own assessment of what is real and what is true. It takes an appreciable increase in confidence to entertain even the idea of questioning the statements of others, regardless of the sometimes loudly proclaimed declarations of their views.
The ability of people to influence others by the powerful, well chosen, eloquent or persuasive use of words must never be forgotten. We must always be aware of the ease with which we can be swayed by those who speak out or write, clearly, confidently and apparently with knowledge and experience of their subject. We cannot be reminded too frequently of this.

How are we affected by our contact with each other? Are we affected equally? If so, is that always the case?

Ronald Knox said it clearly enough: ‘speaking of human friendships ... either affects the other equally’; and the implication is that this is the norm. I am able to read, consider and doubt his words as superficial and misleading through my own accumulated awareness of the reality of life as a human being. My doubt then leads me to compare directly with my own experience and thus to reject his words completely. In fairness, he was contrasting our human friendships with our relationship with Jesus; Jesus is not altered at all by His friendship with us, but we are changed by our relationship with him.
I believe there are no grounds whatever for saying of our human friendships, that ‘either affects the other equally’. For both parties to be affected in any way, and to any extent, however divergent or otherwise the degrees of change, there needs to be – as Carl Jung said – a reaction: some form of chemistry between them. The context of his words is the relationship between the psychologist and patient, where, to quote again from the same passage, ‘the personalities of the doctor and patient have often more to do with the outcome of the treatment than what the doctor says or thinks’.

Our friendships can take a wide variety of forms. They can be similar to Jung’s doctor/patient relationship in that one person can be a supportive guide for the other, occasionally, frequently or permanently. The support may always be going in the same direction, or may alternate between the two: sometimes we are supportive, at other times we need the support. A friendship can be based on two people both being ‘doctors’ at the same time, just as they can both be ‘patients’; and the whole area of confiding in another and giving and receiving support is only one facet of the broad canvas that is friendship. But friendship is not the only contact we have with others; all contact has the potential to change us in some way.

Iron can be sharpened, dulled, or simply battered, bent and dented by iron. In like manner, one person can be sharpened, refined, inspired, dulled, battered or otherwise abused by contact with another. The possibilities are endless, but we can neither receive nor give anything of value without turning to each other and daring to look each other in the eye. We are sharpened by contact with each other only when our honed edges point towards each other: when we meet face to face, whether as doctor and patient, as master and servant, as equals, as enemies, or as friends.
It is in our first meeting that we take the risks. It is in facing each other that we either hurt or heal.

A perfect touch

One of the wonderful things about being human is our capacity for being drawn to a person – even someone we do not know – through an undeniable awareness of powerful emotion: the strength of feeling generated within them.
Such feelings encompass the whole range of our life experience from the blissful and joyous to the most debilitating sense of utter desolation. It is a capacity that both derives from our being human, and contributes to the advancement of humanity towards God’s intended fulfilment. It is also a manifestation of the many-sided giftedness with which we are all blessed; a necessary aspect of the binding together of individuals into a real community. And it goes beyond our usual and habitual understanding of community to where we hear the echoes of Jesus’ prayer that all of us “may be so perfected in unity that the world will recognize” that it was the Father who sent Him. (John 17:23)
Jesus prayed, “May they all be one ...” (17:21) Such simple words: such a powerful message; and prayed, not only for those who lived and breathed with Him two thousand years ago, but for all Christians who have followed after, including ourselves: we who, in the present day, can so easily show ourselves to have not been “so perfected in unity”.

One of the natural traits we all share as human beings is the ease with which we place reliance on our feelings. In much that life brings us, we instinctively base decisions and judgments on our reactions, our bias, our preference and our prejudice. Every day, clear evidence that this is not the best way presents itself in friction and disagreement between individuals, and in news of conflict, injustice and abuse that speaks loud of the scale of wrongdoing across the world. In one way or another, all such wrongs are the fruit of wrong thinking: wrong thoughts and consequently wrong action based on the feelings – or lack of feelings – of people with the power to influence the lives of those around them. Those people may be numbered in millions, and their extreme distress apparently goes unnoticed by those who are its root cause. They do not feel anything about it, and therefore pay no heed to what is so obvious. Of course there are other factors involved, such as pride and greed, but these generate their own sets of feelings and are therefore anchored in the same root cause. All these conflicts, from the smallest argument, show how far we can stray from an awareness of our capacity for being drawn together, for empathy, for reaching out to others in response to feelings within ourselves: feelings brought about by the emotions and strength of feeling in others.
Here we have two completely opposite ways, not only of thinking and feeling, but of being. The one resulting from an ability to sense the feelings of others, the other from an inability to do so. The former is truly human; the latter is inhuman.

Our sense of inadequacy in the face of another person’s desperate need is a natural consequence of the truth contained in Proverbs 14:10: ‘the heart knows its own grief best, nor can a stranger share its joy.’ But for each of us, it is awareness of God’s presence that can and does still make a difference. Even as a stranger, if we can begin to raise that awareness within someone whose plight is blinding them to all forms of consolation, we shall have helped to show them the way. We shall have brought them closer to being able to reach out to Him with the words, “Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord.” (Psalms 130:1).
For me, those depths are not only the place where we feel crushed, deserted and helpless; they are the inner heart of our desolation: the hard to find, and sometimes even harder to believe in place where peace builds its home; the cracked vessel which God repairs through our dejection, our emptiness, and through our regained trust in His presence, leaving the vessel stronger, wider and deeper than before.

Our faith invites us to walk alongside each other, carrying the message that strives for recognition within us into the everyday routine of our days, as well as into the perceived burdens and turmoil of the people around us. It is through this quiet but constant inclination that we are set upon the path towards ‘perfection in unity’. It is faith which tells us to act, not like a stranger, but as a friend: to match our steps with those of others for just a few paces along the way. Our paths have crossed, but God so often causes such meetings to occur at a staggered crossroads: one at which we briefly share the same path before separately journeying on. For us to regard this merely as coincidence would be to deny the power for good that would direct us in all things. Wherever that power leads, we must hope to always have the strength to follow.

Learning to respond to such situations without allowing doubts to steer me away has been a slow process, but the more frequently I do it, the more clear it becomes that this is what is asked of each of us; the touch, the word, the attentive ear, the supportive hand held out- whether accepted or rejected; making it known to those in need that we have noticed, that we are aware and are feeling some of their pain, and quite simply that we are there.
The act of truly being with someone, even for only a few moments, is a hint of ‘perfection in unity’ and a blessing to both parties.
It is a touch of the perfection for which Jesus prayed for us. It is a perfect touch.
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Great and small

“All the points in which men differ, health and strength, high or low estate, happiness or misery, vanish before this common lot, mortality.” (John Henry Newman. Parochial and Plain Sermons,)

Why do we think of ourselves and others as being equally, more, or less able, intelligent, gifted, significant or worthy than anyone else? Other than within an academic or sporting context or when ensuring that a person is sufficiently and relevantly qualified for a specific form of employment, we have little or no reason to think about such things and no cause to consider anything in that way. Newman’s quoted words are from a sermon entitled ‘The Greatness and littleness of Human Life’. Our lives are both great and little, but not in the ways we habitually think, and not in the sense that one person is great while another is not. Thinking in those terms will have faded to nothing for some of us within a few years of leaving school or university, leaving us with the knowledge that nearly all such comparisons, while not being meaningless, are devoid of significant meaning for us in our daily lives. For many, however, such means of dividing individuals are perceived as essential to the advancement of themselves and thus to an imagined improvement of mankind.
All that really does matter is knowing that we have the intelligence and other attributes needed to be the persons we are supposed to be: the mental capacity and the ability to appreciate and think about who we are, where we are going, and our place within our local community and as part of the global family that is mankind.

Using the words, ‘mental capacity’, immediately takes my mind into my world of work, where the Mental Capacity Act 2005 Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards came into force on 1st April 2009. These safeguards are to protect the rights of people who are not able to make their own decisions, particularly where, in their own best interests, there is a perceived need to restrict the extent of their liberty. That liberty, which can include but does not necessarily mean the freedom to come and go whenever they choose, is something we all take for granted. For some, however, that freedom does not exist, and the deprivation may encompass anything that is not in the best interests of the individual, or that may be the cause of unacceptable outcomes or risks for others.

Over the years I have come to know many people with ‘learning disabilities’, some of them very well, and it is only through knowing them that I have become fully aware that this coverall expression refers to something which only has meaning when considered in relation to something else: something with which it can logically be compared. It is purely relative, and in that way is much the same as our usual understanding of ‘intelligence’ or ‘cleverness’. Compared with some people, I could be assessed as having learning disabilities and, in the right context, you or anyone else could describe me in that way without giving any offence – occasionally I have done so myself as a way of highlighting points relating to aspects of my work – but, in general we do not differentiate between ourselves in that way.
For those, however, who are, for mental capacity reasons, unable to live independent lives and who always need some degree of support, the world has been, and to a lesser extent still is, a very different place. The medical profession, and in particular the field of psychiatric assessment, based the classification of such people on a system which gave us words we still hear being used both lightly and offensively in everyday conversation: words which once described particular individuals and groups of people – those assessed and then forever regarded as being within the range of that classification, as follows:

MORON. An adult whose mental development corresponds to that of a normal average child between the ages of 8 and 12.
IMBECILE. An adult person whose intelligence is equal to that of the average normal child between the ages of 3 and 7 years, or between 25 and 50 per cent of that of the average normal adult; person of weak intellect.
IDIOT. A person so deficient in mind as to be permanently incapable of rational conduct and having a mental development not exceeding that of an average normal child of two years old; utter fool.
These definitions are taken from a 1963 edition of the Oxford Dictionary, and recognition of changes that began taking place in the following years can be found in the fact that they are not to be found in my 1979 OED.
This terminology was part of a fixed system that left little room for anything other than a basic categorization based on comparisons and preset criteria. The recognition and valuing of each life as being that of an individual and unique human being was not part of the system.

It is only through getting to know someone that we are able to find, recognize and appreciate the person before us.

We cannot get to know others without communicating with them, and we cannot do that without spending time with them.

Among those with whom I have spent a great deal of time have been people who were both mentally and physically incapable, not just of living independently or of living a meaningful life with input from others, but, without continual care and support, of living at all. Such people are usually classified today as having ‘profound and multiple learning disabilities’, which condition is not infrequently accompanied by severely disabling physical problems. Becoming aware of the person hidden within even the most incapable and apparently unresponsive mind and body has been a real blessing for me. It has been a privilege to be given the opportunity to spend time with them, a pleasure to get to know them, and an honour to have gained their trust and their friendship.

The lifelong vulnerability of such people is emphasised in the minds of those who get to know them by an awareness that they are, in effect, acting as life support machines. But for anyone prepared to search for ways to make a real connection with a person with these extreme needs, the relationship can bear fruit that is as meaningful and life-changing as any experienced in friendships with the most able-bodied and ‘intelligent’ persons.
Two observations from Paula D’Arcy in her book, ‘Where The Wind Begins’, are relevant to this:

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‘... who we are changes the life around us. If we choose to be loving, involved, withdrawn, cold, critical, judgmental – we shape the world in some way.’ ..- ..‘... we were all changed by the shared moments, and carried away a bit of the other. That’s how love is.’

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Looking back (5)

‘Once the hand is laid on the plough, no one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’
(Luke 9:62) .

In the verses of Luke’s gospel preceding these words, a willingness to follow Jesus and to help in the spreading of His message is shown to be only part of His call to us. When Jesus says “Follow me”, He asks us to commit to Him at once, having no regard for the interruption of other concerns and relationships. We all have something that would keep us back from the fullness of that response: something resulting in a form of ‘Just let me finish this first’. The above words of Jesus were spoken in response to the, “first let me go and say good-bye to my people at home”, of one apparently willing follower.
It is a matter of priorities. Looking back to whatever may divert us from this priority is a sure sign of a lack of real commitment, but looking back to the cause of an inner heaviness which makes our committed following feel like an assault course, may be necessary to enable us to grasp the plough more firmly. And that firm grasp is essential if the plough is to turn the soil and not skid lightly over the surface of the stony and sun-baked ground. As soon as our hand is laid on the plough we are expected to hold firm; even the strongest team of oxen, the best tackle, and the sharpest and heaviest of ploughshares will not plough the furrows without the strength and the focussed commitment of the one who walks behind: the one whose hands control the team and the blade.

If that which we seek to follow is Truth and Light, and if our awareness and comprehension of it barely touches the surface of its fullness, then we must expect to be blinded, at the very least momentarily, by attempting to look directly at the source of the light. In seeking to follow we constantly turn towards that light, struggling to find and recognize some form in the brilliance before us. Thus, inevitably, we are blinded. But this is the route we are called to take; this is what faith is all about. Do we really imagine that we can clearly see, interpret, and correctly comprehend that which does not merely generate the light but is that Light?
Whenever we look directly ahead, the light is far too bright for us to see that which we hope to approach, but so long as we continue on our path toward the light’s source we are advancing toward the fulfilment of our deepest desire, and gradually distancing ourselves from the more easily recognized and more immediately satiable desires of the world in which we find ourselves.

In looking back we see our past in the full light of that which blazes ahead of us, and our sight recovers from the blinding. We may recognize this, and speak of it, as seeing our past in the light of experience and more recently acquired wisdom, but the danger is that in the process we remain unaware that we have turned away from our goal. The greatest perceptible illumination is when looking back. We have all wished we could have had the benefits brought by hindsight before we had made some decision, or acted, or spoken, but thoughtful reflection on past events can bring a deeper and more significant understanding of our lives and of our relationship with others.

While the greatest illumination is found when looking back, the greatest clarity in our living of each day is found in looking sideways. In this way we can see the nature of our desires and distractions more clearly as they are defined by the contrast of light and shade: the shadows cast by the light of truth falling upon them enable us to see their true form more easily, even at a distance. In this way we can see those things we refuse to carry with us but which return time and again to drain our faith, our hope and our self-belief of all vitality: the hurts and troubles, the faults and failures, the lies, deceptions, malice and pride; all that we block out or pretend not to notice; all that gives rise to conflict within ourselves and a constantly tormented conscience; all that contributes to the inner heaviness we must try to dispel. These all travel a parallel path, not pulling us off course but always there, enticing us to bring them closer: tempting us to pick them up and carry them once more. Their presence keeps us from walking as we should, though we do not lose our sense of direction by looking towards them or dwelling on them as they always travel in the same direction as ourselves. They are still with us in this way for one reason only: because we keep them there. We have not left them behind.

If we walk towards the light we are walking right, but the struggles we try to hold at bay remain as part of us, and, as such, keep pace with us as we walk, travelling parallel to our own route. Their continued presence gives them an unrelenting power in our lives, and it is this power that makes our progress so difficult. We stumble, as it were, through the heather, the tussocks and mossy humps, slipping into peat hags and constantly struggling to move ahead. We tire easily, we twist ankles and wrench our knees, our backs ache and our hands are scratched and sore from trying to stay upright on such un-trodden ground. For that is exactly what it is.
Our various faults and hang-ups from the past do not shadow us as we walk along our path; rather, we have been driven to take a course parallel to our intended path in an attempt to avoid the baggage we have been unable to shed completely. We still face towards the light but we have to fight every step of the way. Our baggage is on the path we should be treading; un-shouldered but still fixed in our minds as unavoidable and unforgettable. We have stepped off the path in a futile attempt to escape from it.

The path we should be on, however narrow, steep, or precariously perched across peaks and ridges, is a clearly defined path, and however much it may appear to be cluttered and overgrown because of our own inner stumbling-blocks, it will be an easier journey if we rejoin it instead of battling through the undergrowth to the side of it. We have to return to our memories of past failures, claim them as our own, and then, rather than attempt to leave them behind by our own strength, hand them over to God Himself that He may completely separate us from them.

Always, the call is to keep our sight and our every inclination directed towards the light, however little we may comprehend that which lies before us. Every turning away from the light is a form of turning back, but there are times when we cannot unburden ourselves completely without turning round to sever the links with aspects of our past.

‘Every day we decide whether or not to risk searching for the person God created, and the dream with which that person was imbued. Our monsters are whoever or whatever attempts to dissuade us from this course. ... They are the faces and circumstances which say that the dream will never be. – And whether or not to trust and pursue the dream is the soul’s dilemma.’ (Paula D’Arcy. Where The Wind Begins.)

Looking back (4)

However odd the idea may seem, re-reading some of the passages produced here since starting to record my thoughts in this way, has told me much that I did not really know even when writing those words. Much about myself, that is: about my own thinking, beliefs, hopes and fears, my potential (where it does exist) and my lack of it (where it does not), my ongoing journey, my sense of direction, and about the gifts I have received. It has also helped to clarify some of the things which hold me back and which perpetuate my recurring sense of marking time; not of being isolated, lost or stranded, as I have no sense of being left behind, but drifting along with the rest of the world without any certainty as to where I am meant to be within it, and pausing whenever I find those things for which, I believe, all the world should pause. It is the failure of the rest of the world to pause with me which generates the illusion of marking time. And it is my reasons for pausing, and the thoughts arising from those reasons, which provide most of the words that eventually find a home among these pages.

When the words that stand as the title for this blog –‘Soliloquy at The Very Edge’ – first settled into place, I knew that I would be talking to myself in the sense that I would be pondering and weighing my thoughts as I sought to make some sort of sense on the page, but I had not anticipated talking to myself in a way that would make me both student of the teacher, and that same teacher of myself as the student. That this has occurred has provided me with further food for thought, and, while writing this, yet another unanticipated moment when I must pause to consider the implications of that fact.

‘Soliloquy’. It had never struck me before that it is a beautiful word; a word that I should have been ranking with one of my already mentioned favourite words – ‘perplexity’. I have always appreciated it; it has always lodged in my mind as something applicable to me: something with which I am comfortable and from which I am unlikely ever to separate myself, but suddenly there is a new way of interpreting or understanding the idea of talking to oneself. It is not simply giving some form of utterance to one’s thoughts, but teaching oneself. At this moment I am not writing because of something that has already happened, however recent; this is taking shape within me as I write and is driving me toward the suggestion that my reason for being here is not quite as I have thought until now.
Soliloquy is not only a form of talking specifically to oneself, but of speaking without addressing any one else. Inevitably, much of what I have written, while being born of words uttered within myself, has been directed to you the reader; it has been spoken to no particular or specified person but has nevertheless been spoken directly to you, whoever you may be. Without an intention to speak to you in some way I would never have begun to write here at all, but the thoughts into which I now find myself led suggest that perhaps that is not the main aim of the prompting that brought me here.
Could it be that it is the real Teacher within me, the Holy Spirit of God, who, being unable to get through to me in more direct ways, prompts my willingness to go through a more laborious unravelling of thoughts and words? Does the Spirit lead me through this process, not so much that my thoughts may aid or support others, but rather that the process may clarify for me the identity of their source – differentiating between The Spirit and my own wayward ideas – thus more effectively enabling me to recognize His leading, and more meaningfully to reach out to those same others in the future?

Once again I have been drawn completely away from whatever I had been thinking to write about in this post, but failure to go with the leading, wherever it may take me, would undermine all that I have tried to do here. I had set out to continue with the theme of 'looking back', and have been shown that such a theme can indeed have beneficial effects in our future. Anything lacking such effects is mere futility.
Perhaps the important message I need to convey is that looking back, to the right things and in the right way, can enlighten each of us in our search for the path into our future by revealing aspects of our past as having been parts of that same path. It is not the words I write here that have any worth; it is the places to which they may prompt you to go, and which will speak to you as an individual and unique child of God.

‘Do you hear?

Long ago I prepared this,

from days of old I actually planned it,

now I carry it out:’

(Isaiah 37:26)

It seems that ‘looking back’, as a theme, will now run to five posts. I had not anticipated that, but then that is a large part of our world-bound problem; we think we can plot our course into the future when we should be casting ourselves completely on the guidance of the Spirit, sent by God through the reality of Jesus Christ for precisely that purpose. I can have no idea what the Spirit may say to you or where He might lead you, but may He speak loud and clear to you, and may you hear, understand, and respond to His presence in your life.
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